"The Incredible Hulk" 4K Review

If there is a forgotten red-headed (or green-skinned) stepchild of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) it's 2008's The Incredible Hulk. Opening just six weeks after Iron Man, but five years after Ang Lee's unloved 2003 take on the Jade Giant, Hulk (Hulk Dogs, anyone?), it's been seemingly Memory Holed because the role of Bruce Banner was recast by Joss Whedon for 2012's The Avengers with Mark Ruffalo replacing Edward Norton and going on to appear in or voice over a dozen more MCU films and TV shows while Norton hangs out with Terrence Howard, the original Rhodey.

It's also not that great a movie and as the only solo Hulk film (due to distribution rights being held by Universal though Marvel could use the character in as many other projects as they wanted to), but with the villain of the 35th MCU film, Captain America: Brave New World, being someone from the MCU's 2nd film, it was time to revisit the stepchild footnote in case I ever felt like watching CA:BNW - something that considering I've only seen two of the 13 Phase 4 & 5 movies in the theater and haven't even bothered watching a couple, so precipitous has the quality dropoff been for Kevin Feige's woketarded M-She-U, which remains a coin toss. Mostly it was because I'd used Google Opinion Rewards credits to buy it 5-1/2 years ago on digital 4K and never watched it and probably haven't seen it since getting the Blu-ray in 2008.

 After recapping the Hulk's gamma radiation experiment origin story during the opening credits - note to Batman movie makers: We don't need to see Bruce Wayne's parents' murder portrayed ever again; we know what happened - we join Norton's Banner hiding out in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro, where he works under-the-table at a soft drink bottling plant. It's been five months since he's had an "incident" (i.e. gotten all green and ragey), but he remains on the lam after injuring Gen. Thaddeus "Thunderbolt" Ross (William Hurt in his first of five MCU appearances before passing away in 2022 & Harrison Ford assuming the role in CA:BNW) and his daughter, also Bruce's girlfriend, Betty Ross (Liv Tyler), five years earlier. He's learning techniques to control his anger & response to stress and communicating via secure satellite with someone called "Mr. Blue" who may be able to help develop a cure for Hulkness.

 After an accident causes a bottle of pop to be contaminated with his blood, afflicting an old man in the USA (Stan The Man Lee in one of his many cameos), Ross traces the pop back to its source and sends a team led by Emil Blonsky (Tim Roth) to capture him. Naturally, it goes sideways with Banner Hulking out and escaping, waking up in Guatemala. (How did he travel over 4000 miles through a half-dozen countries including the Amazonian jungle? Hey, shut up.) He then hikes up through Mexico to get back home where he hopes to retrieve the data from his experiments to send to Mr. Blue.

Despite his efforts to stay hidden from Betty, she spots him and chases him down. While she's moved on and is dating Ty Burrell from Modern Family (playing the Bill Pullman role, IYKYK), she clearly still loves Bruce. Fortunately, she saved the data he's looking for when Daddy Thunderbolt was packing up their lab after the accident. Unfortunately, when Bruce sends the data to Mr. Blue, the email is picked up by S.H.I.E.L.D.'s surveillance nets and Ross plans another attempt to trap Bruce.

This time his sleeve ace is intended to be Blonsky, who has been dosed with a version of Captain America's Super Soldier serum that they attempted to recreate the lost formula. When the mission fails again, almost killing Betty and Blonsky, the serum is the only reason he survives the blow Hulk deals him. If a little serum worked somewhat, then surely pumping a ton of it into him will make him stronger, right? Nope, as the flawed formula transmogrifies Blonsky into Abomination, a monster so strong and violent that Ross has to allow Bruce to Hulk out to fight him in the climatic battle.

It's interesting seeing how humble the MCU's earliest efforts were - if not for the Nick Fury and Tony Stark end credits cameos and the passing references to Stark Industries or  S.H.I.E.L.D. there'd be no hints Iron Man and The Incredible Hulk were connected - when Marvel Studios was simply trying to independently produce their own films with the characters they hadn't licensed to Fox (X-Men, Fantastic 4, Daredevil, etc.) or Sony (Spider-Man).

 We forget that Iron Man, Hulk, Thor, and Captain America were considered second-string characters compared to Spidey and Wolverine and that The Avengers wasn't a sure thing to happen, much less succeed, when the first Iron Man hit theaters in 2008. Sandwiched between Iron Man in May and The Dark Knight in July, The Incredible Hulk was in meaningfulness trouble even before the change in casting.

 Director Louis Leterrier was coming off a trio of Luc Besson-penned actioners - the first two Transporter flicks & the underrated Jet Li showcase Unleashed - and he does a good job taking the job seriously when most early-Aughts comic book movies still treated them as trifles; something that'd change with the one-two punch of Iron Man and The Dark Knight which cast top-shelf actors and took the stories seriously. The first act plays more like a monster movie, especially in the first Hulk sequence which keeps him in the shadows or obscured by smoke, as he snatches the soldiers and tosses them like dolls. The aftermath of Bruce's Hulk-outs is shown as leaving him weakened, begging for alms, vulnerable. Norton's occasionally twitchy performance is leavened here. (As annoying as he is in real life, Ruffalo was a big upgrade.)

The problem is the script by Zak Penn (Elektra, X-Men: The Last Stand) is subpar and one-note, begging lots of questions like how did Bruce connect with Mr. Blue, whom he finally meets and learns is Samuel Sterns, who after exposure to Bruce's blood is shown having his head swell in a quick shot setting up a payoff that wouldn't come for another 17 years and 33 movies, returning as CA:BNW's villian, The Leader. (As bad as that seems, Blonsky didn't reappear until the woeful Mouse+ series She-Hulk in 2022 as a joke character.) What does Betty do other than look limpid, though that's due to Liv Tyler's minimal thespian skills?

Another stumbling point is the visual effects. The 2003 Hulk suffered from poor VFX, especially the shade of green on Hulk - reportedly it looked great in black & white and for a time they considered doing the comics' Gray Hulk - and rubbery Gumby physics, but while the effects here are an improvement they still look plasticky and weightless like a videogame cutscene, especially the final battle with Abomination. Just a year-and-a-half later Avatar would nail realistic-looking skin complexion and by 2012's The Avengers and the Ruffalo-based Hulk, the quibbles about how it looks were gone.

One arguably better aspect is the moody, intentional cinematography. Recent VFX-laden films are often criticized for flat, washed-out color palettes. This often gets blamed on the predominance of digital cameras, but it's more often due to so much of the frame being filled with pixels added months later, live elements are shot in manner mimicking bright overcast with minimal shadows and flat contrast so they can composite in the backgrounds. The downside is that it looks and feels artificial.

Because so much of the film is film practically on locations - hilariously, Yonge Street in downtown Toronto is used to represent Harlem by hanging an Apollo Theater marquee off a building next to famed Toronto strip club Zanzibar (which inspired the club in Flashdance!); it's also the same block in the first Suicide Squad where Joker and Harley are driving the purple Lamborghini - with extras and wreckage and explosions, only having Hulk and Abomination added, the 4K HDR10 presentation has really deep contrast and rich colors, at times bordering on noirish. Night scenes look better than daylight, especially the Hulk battle against the army at the college where daylight doesn't do the CGI many favors.

Audio wise, in addition to no Dolby Vision there is no Dolby Atmos audio, but the DD+ track has good bass extension to lend a whallop to the gunfire and Hulk smashing. For some reason there are zero extras included with this release. I checked both iTunes and Movies Anywhere and all the commentary, deleted scenes, BTS content, etc. that came on the Blu-ray is omitted here. 

While I'm lukewarm on The Incredible Hulk as a movie, it's a very good digital 4K release. However, the deeper color and HDR comes at the expense of a barebones movie-only release. Frankly, I'd recommend the Blu-ray over this if you can get it for the same price under $10 because of the better audio physical has over streaming and extras.

Score: 5/10. Catch it on streaming/cable.

The first scene in the trailer isn't even in the movie.

"Venom: The Last Dance" 4K Review

Sony has had a pretty bad run managing their sole Marvel character license, Spider-Man, with the high points like the animated Spider-Man: Into the Spiderverse and Across the Spiderverse weighed down by the lackluster Amazing Spider-Man pair of movies. It got so dire that they relented to allow Spidey to join the MCU in Captain America: Civil War and basically outsourced production of solo movies to Marvel resulting in Homecoming/Far From Home/No Way Home trilogy which augmented Tom Holland's Peter Parker with Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.), Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson), and Doctor Strange (Bernadette Cumberbund) and appearances in the last two Avengers movies.

But the license also gave Sony the rights to make movies with Spider-Man adjacent villains and anti-heroes which has led to a trio of absolute disasters - Morbius, Madame Web, and Kraven the Hunter - but also a mysteriously successful run of movies featuring Spidey's symbiote nemesis Venom. Beginning with 2018's Venom, which was OK, and continuing with 2021's noisy & bad Venom: Let There Be Carnage, the trilogy concludes with Venom: The Last Dance which is slightly better than its title and substantially better than the last entry.

After a bewildering cold-open info dump which sets up this movie's Big Bad, Knull (Andy Serkis), and the gobbledygook MacGuffin called the Codex (super original name there) which would free him to destroy the Universe (because no one just wants to rule the Upper East Side), we catch up with Eddie Brock (Tom Hardy) who is temporarily hanging out in our Earth-616 universe thanks to Doctor Strange's spell in No Way Home. Tossed back into his correct universe, he finds he is internationally and wrongly wanted for murder related to events in the last movie.

While literally hitching a ride on the outside of a jet airliner, Eddie/Venom attract an attack by a Xenophage sent by Knull to get the Codex which is formed and acts like a homing beacon when they go into full Venom form. When it's just tentacles or a head popping from Eddie's body, fine; but when he's Venom, ruh roh. And the only way to destroy the Codex is for Eddie or Venom to die.

After escaping the plane encounter, they are beset upon by an the forces of Gen. Rex Strickland (Chiwetel Ejiofor, this character was written as a white guy, wasn't he?) who is trying to eradicate the symbiotes. Only when the Xenophage eats the soldiers are they able to escape again, which makes them even less popular with Strickland.

Trekking though the Nevada wilderness they encounter a hippie family traveling in a VW van (what else?) headed by Martin Moon (Rhys Ifans) who are heading to Area 51 to see it before it gets decommissioned and offers to drop Eddie off in Las Vegas where the conveniently encounter Mrs. Chen (Peggy Lu), the convenience store owner from the first two movies, who is such a high roller they've comped her a suite where they can go and dance to ABBA's "Dancing Queen" while Venom attracts the Xenophage and Strickland's forces to capture them and wait, what the heck is going on here?!? Why did they go full metal Venom when they know it attracts bad monsters with bad goals?

It all ends up in your typical third act VFX overload with lots of monsters and mayhem and a very predictable ending which was foreshadowed from the first moments at Area 51. Writer Kelly Marcel, who came up with the story with Hardy and also steps into the director's chair after co-writing the first and solo writing the second movies, has come up with a lumpy, disjointed string of scenes and events which never really gels into a coherent story. Details are focused on which either set up obvious payoffs or never amount to anything, feeling like there's a lot of footage that got cut to bring it down to a manageable 109 minutes. And Knull is a terrible Big Bad because he comes from nowhere in the series mythology & is just Serkis doing his Snoke voice again.

 Hardy is his usual twitchy self as Eddie who never really seems at peace with his co-pilot, but it's his gonzo vocal performance as Venom (he actually does the voice with audio processing to make it sound more alien) and the only thing that kept me engaged with the story was Venom's running commentary as when Martin hands Eddie a tray of vegan food, saying that "nothing died on this plate," and Eddie hurls it away while Venom barks (internally), "HARD PASS!" - the only thing that spares the movie from getting a similar review.

On the audio-visual front, the 4K HDR grade is above average with bright, punchy colors and good detail. The audio track is also good with the rumbling symbiote and Knull voices having a meaty low-end. 

The Venom series has always been lower second tier comic book fare, but compared to the mess of most of Sony's Spiderverse efforts have been, it's the tallest pygmy in Borneo.

Score: 5/10. Catch it on cable. 

"The Hyperions" Review

 The latest Daily Wire movie pickup which received its premiere for free on YouTube is Jon McDonald's The Hyperions, an oddball indie flick about superheros and family not drawn directly from any existing comics or books, but very reminiscent of several other titles.

 Opening in 1965 we're introduced to young Vista Mandulbaum (Indigo Carey), a tween in a subway car wearing a superhero costume being observed by a starstruck crowd. She's wearing a gauntlet on her arm and when a light surrounding a circular H badge glows, she makes a man in the crowd take out his wallet and drop it in a woman's bag. When the car stops, three security men come in and separate the crowd from her and in comes the awesomely-named Professor Ruckus Mandulbaum (Cary Elwes), her father for a talk about why she's running away.

 We jump ahead 15 years to find an adult Vista (Penelope Mitchell) and Ansel (Alphonso McAuley) visiting the Hyperions exhibit at a museum right before closing time. They change into superhero costumes and proceed to hold several hostages when they realize the target of their actions, the Hyperion badges are locked into the display and only the Professor's fingerprint can release them. 

Via flashbacks we're filled in as to their backstories: As original founding members of The Hyperions, they were recruited (or is it adopted) by the Professor to be recipients of the badges which combine with their DNA to give them specific superpowers. Vista's was the ability to read and control minds; Ansel's was super strength; and their third member, Maya (Elaine Tan), had the ability to teleport. (If you're catching heavy whiffs of the X-Men's Professor X and Nightcrawler there, you're breathing.) But as they got older, they were eased off the team in favor of new members except for Maya who was retained to train the new lineups as we see in an undercooked side plot involving a recruit so clueless that he forgets to use his power to turn his skin into metal (hello Colossus) and gets shot as a result.

 As the story progresses, the motivations of Vista and Ansel become clearer. He misses being a superhero and she's working on behalf of an unknown man forcing her to pull this heist. Their "father" presented them as a family for TV shows and marketing, but was emotionally aloof and cruelly indifferent to their feelings. Will this family be able to get through this ordeal and learn to love and understand each other?

 The Hyperions is an odd film which feels like something you'd see as a short on YouTube musing "What if Wes Anderson made a period comic book movie on a shoestring budget?" McDonald not only wrote, directed and produced, but also handmade the props and did the animation for several sequences. In the intro to the screening, Daily Wire co-founder Jeremy Boreing was effusive about what a visionary auteur he felt McDonald was and while he certainly has a singular vision, the fact the aesthetic immediately evokes Anderson's fussy staged style sort of belies the assertion of originality. 

The first 15-20 minutes are a bit of a lift to get in tune with as the viewer is tested to stay involved with the action until the why to the what begins to get explained with echoes of The Umbrella Academy's broken family scenario. Brief hints of the desire of fame for being a superhero are alluded to, especially as other former Hyperions appear on the periphery. Vista's journey between her being exiled from the team to the heist isn't really fleshed out and the resolution is simplistic. 

Elwe's performance is the highlight as his Professor Ruckus (free rap artist name!) is plummy and eccentric, but not cartoonish as he talks with an animatronic bald eagle in a space suit with a telephone in its chest. Mitchell is also good, as is Tan, but the dropoff in thespianism from the rest of the cast is distracting. 

Independently produced before Hot Fad Plague 2020-2022 shut down the world, The Hyperions has languished in distribution limbo for a few years, initially picked up by Saban Pictures, then acquired by The Daily Wire for their nascent film slate following last year's pickup Run Hide Fight and their first original production, Shut In, which debuted the same way last month, streaming once on YouTube before going behind the paywall of the conservative site. 

 While their moves to bring films without an aggressive Leftist bias to audiences tired of being scolded and lectured by their supposed entertainment, I think using them as a lure to get people to subscribe is mistaken. I listen to a couple of their podcasts, but I don't have time to consume all their offerings to justify the subscription fee and three movies that I don't even know I could watch on my home theater isn't going to make me pony up. 

They should still make movies, but release them theatrically or at least make them available for streaming rental and purchase. While their previous films were good, they weren't subscription sellers either. While The Hyperions didn't do much for me, it's still deserving of an opportunity to be discovered by others without signing up for a political news site even if you agree with the ideological position of the site.

Score: 4/10. Skip it.  

"Bloodshot" Review

With the Pepsi and Coke of comic book companies tied to their respective film studio masters, Disney (who owns Marvel titles) and Warner Bros. (DC), anyone else looking to make movies based on funny books needs to sift through the various indie publishers and thus we have Bloodshot, based on a Valiant Comics character whom I'd never heard of, same as the publisher. Intended to be a potential new franchise for Vin Diesel, it had the twin misfortunes of opening on the last weekend of 2020 before the Wuhan coronavirus shut down the world, effectively making its theatrical run only a few days - it was rushed to digital within two weeks - and also not being very good. It's not exactly BAD bad, but it's definitely not good.

Diesel plays Ray Garrison, a Marine who we meet on the job killing bad guys in Mombasa, Kenya. Returning to base he's reunited with his wife Gina (Talulah Riley) and they head off to vacation in Italy. There they are kidnapped by comic book-named villain Martin Axe (Toby Kebbell), who demands Ray tell him who provided the intel for the Mombasa operation. Ray doesn't know, but Axe kills Gina and then Ray. Shortest. Movie. Ever.

Nope, he wakes up in a lab at Rising Spirit Tech, where founder Dr. Harting (Guy Pearce) informs him he'd died, but had been resurrected by nanite technology in his blood which gives him incredible strength and healing skills. (He's RoboCop and Wolverine now.) Initially having amnesia, he starts to have flashbacks from his life, remembers his wife's murder, leading him to break out of RST and using the nanites ability to connect to the Internet (now he's The Lawnmower Man) and track Axe down and kill him. Very short movie at 35 minutes long.

Oh wait, it's not over at the end of what turns out to be only the first act. Here comes the twist: It turns out that Ray's memories of Gina's death are fake, a computer simulation implanted to fuel Ray's need for revenge against the perceived perpetrators, who are actually Harting's former business partners whom he is bumping off in order to bring his super-soldier project to market himself.

Naturally, Ray doesn't like being made into a puppet, so he teams up with hot ex-Navy diver KT (Eiza González), who has bionic lungs thanks to RST, to take down Harting. Still loyal to the boss are a pair of also-enhanced bruisers, one with robot legs (and later an exoskeleton) and another who was blinded, but has an array of cameras on a vest providing vision. Hijinks ensue.

Rookie director David S. F. Wilson shamelessly apes Michael Bay with some shots in spots (you'll spot them if you see this) and some frames are clearly translated from comic panels, but Bloodshot is generally anemic with a rote Evil Corporate Guy Making Soldiers of Mass Destruction plot - co-written by Jeff Wadlow (a lot of mediocre horror flicks) and Eric Heisserer (probably hired to rewrite; has a better CV and an Oscar-nomination for Arrival) - and unimpressive visual effects.

Diesel doesn't exactly phone in her performance - he hasn't reached Bruce Willis level apathy...yet - but with few exceptions doesn't really do much other than be Vin Diesel. The other performances are adequate with the exception of Lamorne Morris as an amusing uber-hacker who helps Ray counteract the control Harting normally has over the nanites.

 Overall I was bored by Bloodshot. It just looks and feels second-rate with this supposedly sinister corporation seemingly having a handful of employees and the ropey VFX not being up to snuff these days. Movies like this used to fall under the "not bad if you're stuck inside on a rainy day flipping channels" category, but even by that lowered standard, there's not enough to really recommend spending  the time.

Score: 3/10. Skip it.

"Black Panther" Review

Marvel continues its just-can't lose streak to 18-0 (I don't count the weaker entries like The Incredible Hulk or the first two Thor movies as losses; just not home runs) with Black Panther, a quite good movie which unfortunately has been hijacked by SJWs seeking to politicize everything.

Introduced in Captain America: Civil War, Chadwick Boseman continues his journey as T'Challa, who became King of the fictional African nation of Wakanda after his father, T'Chaka, was assassinated, also inheriting the mantle of the Black Panther, protector of the nation, clad in a vibranium - the mythical metal that makes Captain America's shield - cat suit. As explained in a prologue reminiscent of the storybook expository scene in Wonder Woman, a vibranium meteor landed on Africa and the metal's properties fueled Wankanda's rise as a technologically-advanced Utopia, which they have hidden from the outside worth with a shielding dome, cut off from the outside world.

The debate of Wakanda's place in the world and how it could help poorer African nations is forced when an American ex-SEAL, Erik Killmonger (a malevolent Michael B. Jordan), arrives and challenges T'Challa's claim to the throne. He wants to use Wakanda's tech and weapons to basically topple all the nations he feels are holding the African diaspora down and if you think that sounds a little (OK, a LOT) like a race war, I'm touching my nose. But we'll deal with the politics in a moment.

What's remarkable about Black Panther is how little like a Marvel Cinematic Universe movie it is. Other than Martin Freeman's CIA agent character also introduced in Civil War and Andy Serkis' Ulysses Klaue first/last seen in Avengers: Age of Ultron getting his arm cut off (the replacement is literally a blast, along with Serkis' no-CGI-covering-him performance), there are no hints of the Avengers, no drop-bys from Tony Stark. Instead it feels like a Shakespearean family tragedy with the ancient, deeply African tribalism and customs rubbing against the questions of how should a 22nd Century superpower masquerading as a poor 19th Century agrarian land interact with the 21st Century world.

With the usually overqualified casting (two Oscar winners, two Oscar nominees, and everyone else is excellent) that typifies Marvel's serious approach to funny book flicks, there is a weight to Black Panther that seems more like Christopher Nolan's Dark Knight movies than the recent laugh-a-minute Thor Ragnarok. Not that there aren't laughs or it's grimdark like the DC Murderverse slogs, but it's got a lot on it's mind, though more is implied than explicated; it really would've benefited from a tad more breathing room to debate its concept instead of just getting to the final climatic boss battles.

It's not a flawless masterpiece, however. Some of the CGI is surprising subpar and rubbery physics make fights look more like videogames or the Sam Raimi Spider-Man movies. The performance are so solid (though Jordan's street-level American jars compared to the mellifluous African patois of the others) that you don't realize until later we could've stood for more details, especially about Lupita Nyong'o's spy life and Danai Gurira's badass general. Letitia Wright's Shuri, T'Challa's super-brainiac little sister, feels too young for her precociousness - and are there no other scientists or doctors working with her? - and she gets a couple of ignorant racist comments stuffed in her mouth.

Which leads to the part we really shouldn't have to discuss, the inevitable co-option and politicization of yet another piece of entertainment by forces seeking to keep resentment, grievance, division and polarization whipped up in order to advance their agendas. Just a couple months after Star Wars: The Last Jedi was buried in vapid "think pieces" bashing the male characters, screeching "girl power" and proclaiming "diversity" (read: "less white men, yay!"), we're now assaulted by Time magazine covers and a tsunami of commentary about how landmark it is for a black-led superhero movie is in the Era of Trump as if the Blade movies didn't happen 20 years ago and Will Smith wasn't the Biggest Movie Star In The World before passing his crown to Dwayne Johnson.

It's depressing to see a narrative of "black people are finally getting something in AmeriKKKa" being fomented when if that was the case, no one would be making a reportedly $200M budget film with a 98% black cast, black writers, designers and director, female cinematographer (who's white, but she's a lesbian, so her victim class card is punched, twice) which is on track to make over $200M in its opening weekend. Focusing on the skin color, genitalia and sexual behavior of the filmmakers is insulting, not empowering. Unless they're studying the IMDB, audiences doesn't know or care whether the crew behind the camera are black, white, straight, gay, male, female or a left-handed Amish panda with a limp, just whether the movie is good or bad. That the faces are different is just a footnote to anyone not obsessed with scorekeeping.

Black Panther's existence and success moots the premise of those seeking division over what should be another opportunity for ALL people to commune with escapist entertainment which also has thematic gravitas. What's ultimately ironic about the grievance mongers who share Killmonger's rage is that they seem to miss the fact he's the villain and his internalizing of victimhood is what leads to his inevitable downfall. It's T'Challa's pragmatic peace-seeking that is considered the ideal which leads to victory and peace.

So try and tune out the noise and just enjoy another excellent offering from Marvel. As an added bonus, we're not going to have to wait 2-3 years for more of the Wakanda folks; they're going to be back in Avengers: Infinity War in just three months. Can't wait.

Score: 8.75/10. Catch a matinee.

"Guardians of the Galaxy" Review

Watched it again on Vudu with the girlfriend in prep for seeing the sequel with her. She slept through most of it because she's seen it before. Sigh. Hope she remembers enough to understand what's happening.

Score: 8.5/10.

"The Death of 'Superman Lives': What Happened?" Review

In the late-20th Century an attempt was made to reboot the moribund Superman franchise with Superman Lives, a Jon Peter-produced movie with Tim Burton directing, Nicholas Cage starring and Kevin Smith writing the first draft. With tens of millions expended on pre-production and pay-or-play deals, the production was shut down three weeks before it was to start shooting.

As bizarre-looking costume test photos leaked out showing a stoned-looking Cage in a shiny blue rubber suit leaked out - Superman Lives director Bryan Singer would keep that photo handy to shut up anyone who questioned what he was doing with his film - and Kevin Smith's recounting of his involvement with the project (Parts One and Two here) became legend, the true story of what killed Superman Lives was mostly speculation and conjecture until now as writer-director Jonathan Schnepp has pulled together the threads and woven The Death of 'Superman Lives': What Happened?

Stunningly getting the participation of every main and secondary participant but Cage (who appears in fitting videos), Schnepp interviews Peters, Burton, Smith and the two screenwriters who followed him, costume designer Colleen Atwood, and the army of illustrators, designers and artists, showcasing an overwhelming amount of illustrations and test models. Everyone seems candid and honest, though Peters flat out denies Smith's claim that he asked that Superman not fly or wear the costume.

While the copious artwork and deep-diving will probably satisfy uber-nerdy Superman fans, it drags out the feel of the 104-minute documentary making it less suited to more general audiences. It's fascinating to see the ideas being pitched around like the Kryptonian Skull Ship which is exactly as it sounds, but struck me as possibly being too goofy-looking for a live-action movie.

Ultimately, Warner Bros.' string of box office bombs ultimately killed the project (ironically, the money went to fund another bomb), but for those who've always wondered what could've been, for better or worse, The Death of 'Superman Lives': What Happened? definitely sets the record as straight as could be hoped. A must-watch for superhero movie fans; slightly less so for general audiences.

Score: 6/10. Catch it on cable. (It's currently on Showtime.)

"Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice" IMAX Review

Note: This review is SPOILER-FREE and nothing will be discussed in-depth that isn't in the trailers or well-known from press reports. After it opens, I may add additional spoiler thoughts at the bottom, clearly marked.

While DC Comics has done well for themselves in their direct-to-video animated features and TV shows like Arrow and The Flash (I gave up on Supergirl after four episodes), they have been gazing with envy at the Marvel Cinematic Universe's seemingly unstoppable success. (A common dig was that while Batman and Superman were constantly rebooting and treading water, Marvel was making movies with a machine gun-toting talking racoon.)

With The Avengers series raking in record-breaking bank, DC's desire to catch up and get their own all-star team-up Justice League series up and running has been a priority and the plan is for Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice (BvS) - more of a sequel to 2013's Man of Steel (MoS) than Christopher Nolan's Dark Knight trilogy - to get them into the game and also launch a series of stand-alone movie series introducing Aquaman, The Flash, Wonder Woman (whose movie is coming in 2017) and eventually taking another crack at Green Lantern.

While that may've been the plan, they've run into a little problem: BvS is a grim, dark, miserable, noisy, unfun, depressing and simultaneously overstuffed and underdeveloped slog that makes MoS feel like Ant-Man in comparison for entertainment.

The movie opens with the 79,000th retelling of Bruce Wayne (Ben Affleck, disproving the haters) becoming an orphan in case no one knew it (oddly, we don't see Krypton blowing up, so you'd better know Supe's backstory) and then Bruce's experience of the finale of MoS as Metropolis is leveled by the Planetary Engine and Superman's battle with General Zod, killing and maiming many.

It then jumps ahead 18 months and we find Lois Lane (Amy Adams) in Africa getting herself into a scrape which Superman (Henry Cavill); Batman brutally dealing with crime in Gotham City, actually branding criminals, marking them for death; and Lex Luthor Jr. (Jesse Eisenberg) up to something shenanigansy. A Senator played by Holly Hunter is questioning whether Superman can be trusted and Supes is trying to balance playing house with Lois with his guilt for all the carnage that occurred.

It's difficult to explain what goes so wrong with the thin plot without spoilers which is odd because there is actually little not alluded to in the trailers. Before the screening a video message from director Zach Snyder was played welcoming the audience and begging for social media not to be awash in spoilers, but other than a couple of cameos and perhaps the ending, there wasn't much surprising, which was deeply surprising. I was expecting a shocker like, oh, discovering S.H.I.E.L.D. was infiltrated by Hydra in Captain America: The Winter Soldier, but nothing really happens that anyone with a passing familiarity with the comics and broad happenings. The movie is pretty much a 60 times longer version of the trailer.

The problems, as so often they do, begin with the script which is surprising since it was co-written by Oscar-winner Chris Terrio (Affleck's Argo) and David S. Goyer, who co-wrote the Nolan movies and MoS. Disjointed, sketchy, shockingly devoid of substance despite the meaty potential of the subject of what responsibilities do heroes have in their conduct. (It doesn't help that the second season of Netflix's Daredevil series dropped a few days ago and features a riveting debate about vigilantism between the Punisher and Daredevil in the first few hours that's better then the entirety of BvS.) The first hour lurches around as subplots and McGuffins seem to have no connection to one another and then the back half is noisy punching and CGI mayhem, this time obscured by rain and smoke and darkness without even a touch of Pacific Rim's neon lights.

There is a heavy reliance on dreams, visions and nightmares which make for crazy moments, but mean little. There is also some of the most painfully telegraphed dialogue like Lex's trailer moment with Bruce and Clark saying you wouldn't want to fight him. Har-har. (Ahem.) And the teases of The Flash, Aquaman and Cyborg are just lame - the appearance of Spider-Man at the end of the final Captain America: Civil War trailer is so much better.

Affleck's casting was roundly sneered at three years ago, but he does well as an older, jaded, over it Batman. We're shown a defaced (presumably by the Joker) Robin costume, but know nothing of what happened there, but Affleck carries all that off-camera history well. He's mad and fed-up and you get why he wants to whup Superman's butt. Jeremy Irons makes Alfred possess more gravitas than the script provides and he's sort of a mashup of Alfred and Lucius Fox this time. Gal Gadot is intriguing as Wonder Woman, but the script does a terrible job explaining why she's even there, but it's no worse than all the other poorly-drawn details. The big fight itself could've been prevented if one guy simply stopped and listened to the other for 5 seconds.

Everyone else in the cast is pretty much wasted starting with Cavill and Adams. Laurence Fishburne returns as Perry White but seems to be channeling J.K. Simmons' sublime J. Jonah Jameson from Sam Raimi's Spider-Man series as he grouches yellow headline copy. Eisenberg's Luthor is really up a creek as we never really get what his deal is or what his goals are. He does stuff, but there is no rationale or motivation. At least previous movie Luthor had some far-fetched real estate scheme in mind.

After 2-1/2 hours of loud, thudding grimdark and bummer - there's no post-credits scene - I drove home feeling beaten up and not entertained. A fine fellow whom I struck up a conversation with in line and sat a couple seats over from responded to my negative take with, "I don't know how to feel about this." There was literally ONE laugh, ONE applause moment, ONE collective "Ooooh!" at something that had happened. That is a terrible entertainment ratio.

Not to sound like a Marvel fanboy, but it sounds like Captain America: Civil War is going to do battling heroes with philosophical differences a hundred times better than Batdude vs Superdude: Grit Gritty Dark Darker Night of Just Us did. Snyder and the gang are tackling Justice League next and frankly, I'm not interested. I don't need Joel Schumacher schlocky colored foolishness, just some well-written storytelling that rise to a higher plane than what a kid with action figures and the desire to bash them together could provide. A huge disappointment. 

Score: 4/10. Rent the Blu-ray.

"Sin City: A Dame To Kill For" Blu-ray Review

My original theatrical review is here and on second viewing, it still stands. It's just not as much fun and labors when it should flow.

As a Blu-ray, the transfer is good, considering the stylized look. On the audio front, the surround mix is hella booming and active; it will scare the pets if you turn it up to your usual volume setting.

The extras continue Robert Rodriguez's really disappointing sparsity of recent releases. No 10-Minute Film School, no Cooking School, not even a commentary track. Compared to the jam-packed Blu-ray for the original Sin City, it's a massive letdown with only one nifty feature present again: The "All-Green Version" in which the movie is run at high speed with none of the virtual sets in place, revealing it was pretty much shot with actors in an empty green warehouse. Otherwise, it's just a handful of brief EPK interviews with a few of the actors and a trailer for the original film. Weak.

Score: 7/10. Rent it.

"With Great Power: The Stan Lee Story" Review

If there's one man who is synonymous with "comic books" to both readers and civilians alike, it's Stan Lee, the subject of With Great Power: The Stan Lee Story. With a gusto that shows no sign of flagging at age 91(!!), he has been a tireless figurehead for comics as creator of a pantheon of heros for Marvel including Spider-Man, the X-Men, Hulk, Iron Man, Thor, Fantastic Four and more.

This documentary provides a tidy overview of the man and he's career, though it makes the usual documentary stumbles like forgetting to tell us when he was born (1922) despite explaining his real name was Stanley Martin Lieber and he converted his first name into its popularly-known form because he thought he'd only be writing funny books for a while before becoming a Serious Writer.

In addition to the copious amounts of archival footage, photos and testimonials, a good bit of time is spent on his personal life with his sassy English wife of 68 years (that's years married, not old!) and their only surviving daughter. She's a pip.

While hardcore comic nerds may know all this stuff already or quibble about Jack Kirby deserving more attention - I think he's properly represented in this context - With Great Power: The Stan Lee Story is a breezy profile of one of the most prolific and influential voices in 20th Century American (and global) culture. Nuff said!

Score: 7/10. Catch it on cable. (Viewed on Netflix)

"The Amazing Spider-Man 2" Review

I'm not a fan of the Sam Raimi-Croaky Maguire (sp?) Spider-Man films for various reasons and Sony's desperate reboot (only 10 years after they booted the franchise in order to keep the rights from reverting to Marvel) was another unnecessary origin story rehash. While Andrew Garfield and Emma Stone were good upgrades over Maguire and Kirsten Dunst (though her boobs will be missed; Google Melancholia to make up for it), the story was meh (oh look, another accidental villain) and cold-feet studio editing lopped away hunks of plot, leaving The Amazing Spider-Man disjointed and halting, if pleasant enough in a too-familiar way.

Since sequels are the way of life these days it was inevitable that The Amazing Spider-Man 2 was going to happen, but unfortunately for the franchise, they sort of swung straight to what made Spider-Man 3 such a fiasco, with too many stories, too many villains and not enough of what would make it matter.

The problems start immediately with a pre-credits sequence revisiting the shadowy circumstance of Peter Parker's parents perishing. They've been hinting that Peter Parker's powers prevail due to his father (Campbell Scott) tinkering with his DNA, but again they don't really make it clear. Then we're with Spider-Man chasing Paul Giamatti's Russian gangster character as Peter almost misses his high school graduation where Gwen Stacy gives a foreshadowing-heavy valedictory speech. He's haunted by visions of her father (Denis Leary), to whom he promised to stay away from at the end of the last movie. Then we have Jamie Foxx as a nerdy engineer who idolizes Spider-Man, but after an accident turns him into Electro (oh look, another accidental villain), he wants to kill Spider-Man.

But wait, there's more, Harry Osbourne (Dane DeHaan), a childhood friend of Peter's returns for the death of his father, taking control of Oscorp. Ill with the same weird genetic disease that claimed his father's life, Harry believes that Spider-Man's blood can cure him, but of course it doesn't and thus he becomes Green Goblin. By accident. Because of course. (It is a Spider-Man movie after all and hardly anyone is a bad guy by choice in these things.)

If they'd just chosen  two or three items off the menu, perhaps The Amazing Spider-Man 2 would've been a better movie. How to keep one's loved ones safe when you're a superhero is an interesting premise. How obsessive fandom can curdle into hatred has been done before (basically this is the arc Jim Carrey's Riddler followed in Batman Forever), but could still have potential. Same with Green Goblin, though that would require making it more plausible that Harry and Peter didn't separate when they were in 3rd grade. The mythology about his parents never makes sense and the hidden lab in the subway is absolutely ludicrous. (How is it still receiving power and working after a decade other than reasons?)

The way they handle Giamatti's "transformation" into the Rhino is ultra-stupid as well and exists only because Sony was eager to set up a Sinister Six all-villains movie. Why? Because Sony only has the rights to Spider-Man making him a lonely Marvel hero in a universe by himself compared to Fox's X-Men and Fantastic Four holdings and Marvel Studio's gigantic roster of cash cow franchises. When the only reason The Amazing Spider-Man existed was to keep the rights, it's unsurprising that Sony didn't proceed with story and characters as their priority and this muddle is the result.

It's too bad because the leads are good as far as they're allowed to work within the stuffed story. Stone will be missed whenever they get back into making a third installment (allegedly in 2018 due to the disappointing BO on this one), but they always planned to stick to the comic's canon. The visual effects are much more CGI-heavy whereas they attempted to use stuntmen for the web-swinging before. Sometimes it works, sometimes it looks weightless. While the VFX for Electro are pretty spiffy - he looks like a glowing, charged glass-and-plasma creature, sort of like Dr. Manhattan in Watchmen, the effects of the final battle scene are cartoony-videogamey in appearance.

I wasn't that crazy about the first film and the mehness continues. Maybe one day a proper Spider-Man movie can/will be made, but I suspect it will require prying the rights out of Sony's hands first and that's highly unlikely to happen.

Score: 5/10. Catch it on cable.

"Sin City: A Dame To Kill For" Review

In the 300+ DVD reviews I did for IGN/The Digital Bits, I think I gave out fewer than five 10/10 scores. I'm drawing a blank on what they were, but the two I remember were Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow (which had haters throwing that at me YEARS later - "You gave Sky Captain a 10, so your opinion on [whatever] is meaningless.") and the 2005 collaboration between renegade filmmaker Robert Rodriguez and comic book legend Frank Miller bringing to life the latter's graphic novels, Sin City. An exhilarating take on modern retro noir, it combined live actors with impossible-to-photograph-that-way CGI environments in high contrast black & white which echoed the bold art of Miller's books and the pitch black denizen of Basin City. It looked like nothing seen before and the arch hard-boiled dialog and stories walked the fine line between pastiche and parody. Mickey Rourke's comeback began here as brought Marv to vivid gritty life as his real-life effed-up mug was buried under makeup, but allowed the tender heart of the brute to shine through.

The road to this sequel has been a long one hampered by factors ranging from Miller foolishly believing he could do this movie thing without R.Rod (with the woeful The Spirit being the result) and R.Rod's own loss of focus culminating in the dreadful Machete Kills. Cast members had retired (Devon Aoki) and died (Michael Clark Duncan and Brittany Murphy) and while Angelina Jolie was rumored to be in talks to play the titular (in both senses) dame, that role ultimately went to Eva Green. Finally, 9 long years later we are getting back to the white blood and blacked hearts in Sin City: A Dame To Kill For.

A combined prequel/sequel to Sin City it draws both from Miller's existing graphic novels and fresh material penned for the movie, SC:ADTKF hews to the same interlocking episodic structure of the first one, though to less effective result due to the patchwork nature of the material. Whereas the first movie had a time jump between the halves of That Yellow Bastard segment with Bruce Willis and Jessica Alba which book-ended the movie, the three stories generally occupied the same space and time. This time there's a dissonance caused by stuff happening with Mickey Rourke's Marv (who died in the first movie, SPOILER ALERT for 9-year-old movie) and Dwight (this time played by Josh Brolin, pre-transformation into Clive Owen) and the conclusion of Nancy Callahan's (Alba) quest for revenge and the main story block, A Dame To Kill For. (For those trying to keep the timeline straight, The Hard Goodbye, Marv's story, is the last of all stories in both movies though it being the middle of the first. Confused?)

The movie opens with a clunky prologue reintroducing Marv and his warrior's code of justice and it immediately tips that there's rust in the gears of R.Rod/Miller's storytelling. Then Joseph Gordon-Levitt takes center stage as a card sharp with supernatural luck as he cleans out Powers Booth's corrupt Senator Roark (whose son was that yellow bastard) and then seems surprised that it backfires. Nancy's revenge ends the movie and somewhere in there is something involving Ray Liotta that I barely remember and it's all well and good, but everything else pales before the movie's longest and richest segment, the titular story.

This dame to kill for (and get killed for) is played by MVP Eva Green (see above, yeah) and she delivers more nudity than everyone else in BOTH Sin City films combined and has the black widow act down; you believe she's able to lead men to obsessive self-ruin. Between Penny Dreadful and this, Green is having a stellar year both acting and laying on the sexy. (Angelina Jolie was rumored to be wanted for this role and she would've killed it, but Green doesn't make me wish they'd made it 5 years ago with Jolie.)

I loveLOVELURVED the first Sin City, but while sitting in the screening the other night, it just felt lumpy and long; I was surprised it's only 1h 40m because it felt like 2 hours easily. The overheated noir dialog just dragged on and on and it lacked the original's energy; it's not the exhilarating rush the first was. Marv is just a charismatic gorilla this time - cool as usual, but lacking depth. Alba is OK when it counts, which was a pleasant surprise because as beautiful as she is, she's got the thespianic chops of a puppy. I didn't care for Josh Brolin as Dwight; he seemed like a different guy than Clive Owen, not just a different face.

Score: 7/10. Catch a matinee; skip the 3D.

"Guardians of the Galaxy" Review

Marvel Studios has been knocking them out of the park with terrifying regularity since the first Iron Man arrived in 2008, paving the way for two Captain America and two Thor movies, not to mention the pair of Iron Man sequels and The Avengers, which is only the #3 highest-grossing movie ever (or the highest-grossing not directed by James Cameron) with Avengers: Age of Ultron coming next year to Hoover up any remaining money to pay the cryogenics storage bill for Walt Disney's head. They could clearly just keep churning out Avengers crew sequels and check the mad chedda stacks while Warner Bros./DC are still two years away from their next stumbling steps towards a hoped-for Justice League movie, but with some serious cajones they've thrown down the (Infinity) gauntlet with their boldest departure yet: Guardians of the Galaxy.

Why bold? Because hardly anyone outside of the hardcore nerd corps has even heard of them. (My Culture Vultures co-host, Otto the Autopilot, knows all about them which makes the fact that he has a wife and kid seem even more miraculous.) A cult series of books in the Marvel pantheon, the Guardians are so obscure I have to admit I'd never heard of them when it was announced, though I was very intrigued by the promise of a talking raccoon with a machine gun in the announcement art. And if the idea of a machine gun-toting talking raccoon is enough to get you into a theater - and why shouldn't it? - then you're in for a treat because while that's the best thing about Guardians of the Galaxy, it's not the only good thing.

The plot is a blur of names and places, but here's what I can sorta remember: Chris Pratt is Peter Quill (but he's trying to make the handle "Star Lord" happen), a fortune hunter who was kidnapped from Earth in 1988 for no explained reason and raised by space pirates called Ravagers led by a blue-skinned Michael Rooker who has a whistle-controlled killer arrow. (This isn't even the weird part.) After retrieving a silver orb from ruins on a planet, he finds himself being hunted by forces ranging from minions of Ronan the Accuser (Lee Pace), a Kree who seeks the destruction of the planet Xandar for reasons and wishes to deliver the orb to Thanos (a performance-captured Josh Brolin) to have him do the deed.

Also chasing him is Zoe Saldana's Gamora (this time she's green!) who is Thanos' adopted daughter and a pair of bounty hunters chasing Quill for reasons, voiced by Vin Diesel and Bradley Cooper playing, respectively, a walking tree (think the Ents from Lord of the Rings) with a three-word vocabulary (i.e. "I am Groot.") and that raccoon. When they're all captured for reasons and sent to a space prison for reasons they encounter Drax the Destroyer (MMA/WWE star Dave Bautista), a bruising hulk of a man whose family was murdered by Ronan and seeks revenge. Prison breaks and hijinks ensue.

I haven't even mentioned what's so important about this orb, or rather what's contained within, because I'm afraid I'm making it sound like you'll need to take notes for a quiz. Suffice to say that if you saw Captain America: The First Avenger and Avengers and Thor: The Dark World, it ties in with the magic items from those movies, but it won't really matter until the third Avengers movie in 2017 or 2018, so don't sweat it. Instead just sit right back and take a two-hour trip to the wacky weird side of the galaxy.

What makes Guardians of the Galaxy work despite its overstuffed and barely comprehensible plot is the wit and charisma of the cast, especially the computer-generated ones. It's easy to want to compare Pratt's Quill to Han Solo, but Star Lord isn't a charming rogue as much as overgrown man-child who has but two artifacts tying him to his home on Earth. Saldana is sexy as usual playing a cybernetically-enhanced assassin with a tender heart even when chased by her adoptive sibling, Nebula (Karen Gillen), because reasons. It's too soon to say that Bautista could be the new Rock in the "surprise acting chops" department, but he is very deadpan as an irony-deficient, ultra-literal warrior confounded by Quill's jargon.

Lastish, but not least, is the work of Diesel and Cooper. People seem to have forgotten that Diesel was the voice of The Iron Giant 15 years ago, but his challenge here is conveying emotion with only the same three words. He's helped by deft CGI, but it works. However, the standout is Cooper's Rocket (not exactly a raccoon), who steals the movie with his snarky, sarcastic dialog emanating from a utterly realistic raccoonish body. Of all the characters, Rocket is the most fleshed out especially in a drunk scene where he slips about his origins. When the trailers showcasing Rocket came out, I suggested that Marvel better have plushy toys stockpiled because they're going to be this year's Cabbage Patch Kids, but now I KNOW they'd better have all the child slave labor in Asia making them because they're going to be hot-sellers.

I'm interested in my diligently non-nerdy, not-particularly-into-comic-book-movies girlfriend will make of the blizzard of plot and references that jam-pack Guardians of the Galaxy. (She'll probably like the AM-radio greatest hits soundtrack of Bowie, Runaways and other soul-pop hits that's used instead of some current wubby techno bleep-bloop; not that there's anything wrong with that.) My sidekick really loved it and I really, really enjoyed it, but the avalanche of story caused by combining origin stories and a Big Bad plot cost it a half-point. I recommend just rolling with it because it's not really that important to enjoying the loose, breezy humor and wackiness. Sure, real people would have their skeletons pulverized by the beatings dished out in the numerous fight scenes, but what's real in these sorts of movies? Make sure to stick through the credits for the traditional button scene which is either a hint at a future Marvel movie or merely Marvel showing that no matter what happened in the past, they're mighty enough to own it.

Score: 8.5/10. Pay full price.

One warning: If you are sensitive about a loved one dying of cancer, the opening may be emotionally troubling. I was talking to a woman whose step-mother recently died suddenly from cancer and I suggested she wait until it hits video to catch it because it may be too soon. 

"The Wolverine" Review

Everyone hates X-Men Origins: Wolverine. I don't - I mean it's got problems with too many characters and a totally poochscrew of Deadpool at the end which made everyone mad - but compared to real garbage like Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer and Elektra, it's an OK flick. That said, everyone is comparing The Wolverine to Origins when they should be judging it on an independent basis and on that basis, it's a good movie, though it stumbles toward the end due to our old friend, poor writing-by-committee.

This is a direct continuation of X-Men: The Last Stand - another movie everyone claims to hate beyond its flaws - with Logan (the even more ripped HUGE JACKEDMAN) living in a cave in Alaska or Canuckia, drinking whiskey and having nightmares in which Jean Grey (Famke Janssen), his lady love whom he had to kill at the end of the last movie, appears to him, basically encouraging him to die and join her in eternity. He's Emo Grizzly Adams.

While getting into a scrap with some illegal hunters in town, he's assisted (like he needs help!) by Yukio (newcomer Rila Fukushima), a kickass anime-looking chick with a wicked sword who has been sent by her boss, a billionaire Japanese tycoon whose life Logan saved while in a prison camp outside of Nagasaki when an atomic bomb was dropped on it. He's old and dying, but wants to thank Wolverine by taking away his immortality. (Yeah, kind of a weird thanks, no?) After the old man dies, Yakuza thugs attack the funeral and attempt to kidnap his granddaughter Mariko (Tao Okamoto). While rescuing her, Logan is shot and for some reason isn't healing like normal. Something has happened and he's vulnerable.

Partially based on an acclaimed run by Chris Clairmont and Frank Miller (I haven't read it), there were high hopes, especially when Darren Aronofsky - who directed Jackman to what should've been an Oscar nom in The Fountain - was supposed to direct, but after the earthquake/tsunami/nuclear plant disaster he bowed out and James Mangold (Walk the Line and Girl, Interupted; both of which earned acting Oscars for Reese Witherspoon and Angelina Jolie, respectively) stepped in and does a good job with things. The action scenes are respectable, but it's even better in the quieter moments that allow Jackman to get into the conflicted state he's in. The best parts of the first two X-Men movies were the moments in which you really got the feeling that while superpowers are nice, not being alone because of those powers because the world is terrified of you would be better.

Where The Wolverine gets its paw stuck in a trap is the convoluted plot involving the old man, control of his company, that he skipped his son in favor of his grandfather and what side the Yakuza and a ninja army are on. By the time we get to the third act and the obligatory, studio-pleasing battle royale between Logan and a giant metal mecha-samurai (thus enraging nerd purists about the Silver Samurai), it's all cards produced from sleeves and who cares? It doesn't help that Mariko is too bland to be a compelling love interest, too. She's attractive, but dull. Give me the weird ninja chick any day.

Still, it's good to see Wolverine slashing (bloodlessly) up the silver screen again and make sure to sit through the first part of the end credits (you don't need to wait until the end like others have done) for a very cool scene which directly sets up next year's uber-team-up, X-Men: Days of Futures Past.

Score: 7/10. Catch a matinee.

"Man of Steel" Review

After what seemed to be a decade of post-production, Zac Snyder's epic scale reboot of Superman, Man of Steel, flies into theaters weighed down by the gloominess of producer and Dark Knight mastermind Christopher Nolan.

The first shocks come early with the portrayal of Krypton. We've only seen it as an icy Styrofoam world in the original Superman, so to see animals (that seem left over from Avatar) and a culture that has babies like The Matrix is both jarring and surprisingly unoriginal. In this telling, Jor-El (Russell Crowe) and his wife have had the first natural birth in centuries (of course), but since the planet is dying, he's going to send this last son of Krypton to Earth, but this time also carrying the genetic code for all Kryptonians with him in a slightly different form.

Instead of recounting young Clark Kent's upbringing in Smallville, Kansas in the usual linear manner, David S. Goyer's script (with the story co-written by Nolan) uses a flashback structure showing a bearded Clark wandering around like Bruce Banner, trying to find his place in the world and experiencing the same things he did as a boy raised by the Worst Father Ever, Kevin Costner. Seriously, when you sum up the totality of his terrible advice - "Let kids die to hide your power. Let me die because." - it's a miracle Clark didn't become Superemo. While this structure spares us some of the boredom, it only really works because everyone knows Superman's origin story so well, these broad sketches suffice, but also prove unnecessary.

In mashing up the plots of the first two Christopher Reeve movies, General Zod (Michael Shannon) comes to Earth looking for Kal-El and decides that Earth would be a fine place to regenerate Krypton, even if it requires exterminating the indigenous population of the planet (that would be us humans) via terraforming with a giant "world engine" that looks like the Reaper ships from the Mass Effect games. Much destruction ensues.

The old Superman movies were hampered by the limited special effects technology of the late-Seventies. The slogan was, "You will believe a man can fly," but while the flying was sort of OK most of the time, the fights in Superman II were just painful to watch in their sluggish non-glory. That's fixed here as you definitely get the sensation of superpowered beings pounding the bejeebers out of each other. You want train engines being thrown like toys? You got it! The problem is that Snyder rapidly sails into the pure noise zone as Metropolis is pounded into dust. Forget the hundreds of billions in damage and the tens of thousands of people who are probably lost in the chaos, it's simply finely rendered particle system VFX static after a certain point. It loses its capacity for visceral impact early on and gets less exciting, not more.

As with Brandon Routh in Superman Returns, the question is whether Henry Cavill can adequately fill Reeve's cape and the answer is yes despite the problematic script. (Same as it was with Routh, whose career suffered through no fault of his own when his turn flopped; it's not like Clooney in Batman and Robin.) Saddled with lots of doubts due to his crappy upbringing, he manages to make Kal/Clark/Supes work. The rest of the cast - Shannon, Laurence Fishburne as Perry White, Amy Adams as Pulitzer Prize-winning (as she is forced to say) Lois Lane - are solid, though why did they have to make Diane Lane as Ma Kent look so weathered.

While I was watching Man of Steel, I was enjoying the huge scale but as the noise factor worked against it and things dragged on to the conclusion, I realized that I wasn't having much fun. There are perhaps two laughs in the whole movie and that's not enough for an over two-hour comic book flick. I'm not demanding an Avengers-style laugh riot, but as with Nolan's The Dark Knight Reloaded, this "dark and gritty" take on things is getting to be a drag.

Score: 7/10. Catch a matinee.

"Iron Man 3" Review

Marvel's "Phase Two" - the post-Avengers slate of movies which will include the upcoming Thor: The Dark World, the shooting Captain America: The Winter Soldier, the in pre-production Guardians of the Galaxy, all leading up to Avengers 2 - kicks off with Iron Man 3 which serves as a conclusion to the trilogy; an impression that the closing credits being a greatest hits clip reel from all three Iron Man movies reinforces.

After the events of The Avengers, Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr. killing it as usual) is a wreck - racked by crippling anxiety attacks, unable to sleep, drifting away from his lady love Pepper Potts (Gwyneth Paltrow, who's never been hotter and when you see the movie, you'll get what I mean by that), spending his nights tinkering on a literal army of suits, implanting sensors into his body to act as magnets that attract the pieces to him. The man inside the iron is corroding.

Meanwhile, a shadowy terrorist called the Mandarin (Ben Kingsley) is reining terror via television hacks portending doom for the President as a lesson to America which is never really made clear. After Tony's pal Happy Hogan (Jon Favreau) is critically injured in a Mandarin attack, Tony dares the Mandarin to come and get him, which he does in a spectacular assault, showcased in all the ads and trailers, on his Malibu home. Barely escaping with his life, Tony crash lands in Tennessee where he needs to find a way to repair his broken suit and psyche and figure out what the Mandarin is up to and how it connects to soldiers working for a slick Guy Pearce who has developed a tech called Extremis which may have miraculous powers albeit with terrible side effects.

While there is plenty to like in Iron Man 3 - especially some great quippy stuff and a scene involving Rhodey's (Don Cheadle) account name and password - there are some weird flaws in the script which hurt things overall. Comic book fans who were already at Nerd Rage Level Orange over the casting of a non-Chinese actor as the Mandarin will go full Level Red/DEFCON 1 when they see how the character is handled in the movie. Non-comic fans probably won't mind, but comic fans will howl. The overarching plot of revenge targeting the President never makes sense and the motivation of the villain seems specious. They really should've had Joss Whedon do a hardcore polish on things.

When watching the Avengers, as awesome a feat it was of juggling so many balls, I felt like something was missing though I couldn't quite put my finger on what could've been improved. Here it's easy to easy to diagnose the core problem: the weakly-motivated villain who seems aimed at the wrong target. Somehow co-writer/director Shane Black (who wrote Lethal Weapon and collaboated with RDJ on Kiss Kiss Bang Bang) decided that Tony Stark's nemesis should be fear and thus the villain villain was given short shrift. It's like how the awful Skyfall wanted to make Bond getting old the problem so we were given a terrible villain who was little more than a disgruntled ex-employee who should've taken his grievance to his union rep.

I've seen a lot of hyperbolic bashing of Iron Man 3 around the Internet from Manichean nerds whose binary mentality can't see anything between flawless victory and epic failure, so they're calling this the "Worst. Marvel. Movie. Ever." In a world where the first Hulk, Elektra, and Fantastic 4: Rise of the Silver Surfer (not to mention DC's pathetic The Dark Knight Reloaded) are fighting for last place, perhaps the twerps need a trip to the optometrist to have their sense of proportion checked.  There's also an element of "it doesn't feel like the other movies" from the same people who'd be first to whine that "they're just recycling the same stuff over and over instead of doing something different." Ignore them.

It comes down to this: Is Iron Man 3 good, does it have good writing, acting, action and is it worth seeing. The answers are yes; mostly, but could've been improved in the plot; yes; yes; and yes. Nuff said!

Score: 8/10. Catch a matinee.

While there are a couple of spoilers in the trailer, it's interesting to see how much isn't in the trailer and I've chosen to skip over those parts in the review because it's nice to be surprised.

"The Dark Knight Rises" Review

Let's just cut to the chase: Christopher Nolan has made his first mediocre-to-bad movie and as a result The Dark Knight Rises (TDKR) brings his dark-and-gritty take on the Batman mythos to a dull, noisy, convoluted conclusion. Forget whether it can get close to the brilliance of The Dark Knight (TDK), it's a matter of where it ranks against the Joel Schumacher films and right now I'd say better than Batman and Robin (duh), but not quite as good as Batman Forever. No, I'm not kidding. If ever Shakespeare's phrase, "it is a tale, told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing," applied, it's relevant here.

It's hard to pick out what's the worst part of this disappointing movie because there are so many to choose from. Should I fault the incomprehensibly Byzantine plot involving a massive conspiracy to bankrupt Bruce Wayne in order to get at a shelved green energy project that could be used as a nuclear weapon? How about the massive gaps in logic we're supposed to ignore like how a city of millions of people can be cut off from the outside world, but the trash never seems to pile up, no one seems to be on the streets other than the resistance (which the bad guys don't seem to notice or do anything about), and the villains, once revealed don't even hew to the beliefs and behaviors that the series laid out way back in Batman Begins? There is just so much to pick on.

The opening sequence involving a plane-to-plane hijacking is thrilling and well done - it could be from a James Bond film - but a harbinger of the illogic that plagues TDKR. Who is the guy the CIA is transporting? Why is he in the middle of nowhere and how does Bane know how to get caught and loaded on that same plane in order to make the hijacking work? The whole movie is a string of single points of failure (i.e. if something doesn't go the way the plot needs it to every step of the way, then the whole plan collapses) and it continues in the very next sequence with the introduction of Catwoman who uses the cover of a cater waitress delivering the meal to where Bruce Wayne is hiding out from a party. She is shown throughout the film to be a clever and resourceful woman, BUT if Alfred hadn't given her the milk run, how else would she have done what she needed/wanted to do?

Even the Big Bad, Bane, is a mess because nothing about him is explained. How does he have legions of followers willing to die for him without question? How does he whack minions at will without the rest of the red shirts looking at Monster.com for a better henchman job? Bane sounds like Sean Connery mimicking General Grievous, the asthmatic alien cyborg from Revenge of the Sith (a similarity I'm frankly surprised no one else has noticed), and as menacing as Tom Hardy is physically, he isn't able to overcome the loss of half his face due to the mask. (No one has the presence to ask how he eats with that thing on?) [UPDATE: Check out the redubbed video I've posted at the bottom of this review. Killer!] We're fed a lot of red herrings as to his origins and when his true position on the bad guy's org chart is revealed, he loses all his prior menace. There are also a couple of weaselly corporate types trying to move in on Wayne Enterprises at his behest, but we don't really get how he controls them, why they're trying to screw over Catwoman, and where they came from either. There's never a sense of knowing who these people are or where they're from.

When the movie starts, it's eight years after the end of TDK and Batman has disappeared from Gotham, but the streets have been cleaned up by Commissioner Gordon and the GCPD. When Bane first makes himself know, Bruce suits up and gets his ass brutally kicked in his fight with Bane and ends up in some prison pit in what looks like India. There is a huge chimney leading to the surface that we're told Bane escaped from as a child and Bruce has to recuperate and do the climb. There is a literal leap of faith involved and the audience is required to leap the plausibility gap that comes from wonder what kind of prison has ANY means of escape like this AND PROVIDES SAFETY ROPES ATTACHED ABOVE THE LEAP POINT?!?!?

Nolan stopped trying to make Gotham City appear like a real place with The Dark Knight with its use of Chicago and all its signature skyline elements in view - remember the monorail from Batman Begins? Apparently neither does Nolan - but he really stops trying here as scenes play out in obviously Los Angeles, obviously Pittsburgh, and obviously New York City. Continuity is told to take a powder as a heist that occurs when the Gotham Stock Exchange opens for trading in the morning leads to the crooks escaping a short time later and then suddenly night falling from one shot to the next and the conclusion occurs in darkness. Why didn't they just have the attackers hole up until darkness instead of making such a huge distracting gaffe?

Finally, because I could go on and on and on and on with spoilers about further dumb details, in BB the League of Shadows had a scheme to destroy Gotham in order to rebuild it as they saw fit. They had anointed themselves to be society's judges with the power to sentence cities to death when they're deemed unruly. For some reason here now they seem to be little more than suicide bombers who won't even be around for the after party after they blow the place off the map. Huh? I've seen it suggested that the League of Shadows is like Al Qaeda without the Islam part, but even a terrorist organization with suicide bombers as a front line weapon has commanders behind the lines to capitalize on victory. Here, it doesn't appear so; they appear to be just looking to vaporize Gotham because that's what they do.

After a half-dozen paragraphs of rambling grousing, you're probably wondering if there is anything good in this bat debacle?  Yes. Yummy Girl (or Anne Hathaway as you people call her) steals the movie as the Jewel Thief Selina Kyle Who Isn't Called Catwoman But We Know She's Catwoman with all the funny lines and the only genuine character arc in the who place. She starts off carefree and robbing for the lulz and parroting some trite Occupy class warfare agitprop, but when sh*t starts getting REAL, we can tell that she's having some qualms about her decisions. She's both a critical part of the bad guys' schemes and a dupe suckered into selling out her hunting grounds and then not being paid for her trouble. And she rocks her catsuit well; you can almost see Nolan writing, "And then Catwoman parks dat azz on the Batpod, the light rimming her fine booty." Like this:

Yay!

Joseph Gordon-Levitt, another holdover (along with Tom Hardy and Marion Cotillard) from Inception, is also distinctive in his role as a street cop who seems to too easily figure out Bruce Wayne's secret identity. In fact, the whole plot thread of him and Gordon double-handedly doing more to get an insurrection going while Batman is still in a hole is another misstep because it shows that other than the very, very end, Batman isn't even needed to save Gotham and before that end, it's Catwoman, not Batman who actually saves the day over and over and over. Got that? BATMAN IS CATWOMAN'S SIDEKICK!!! Oy vey! But for all the big empty explosions and attempts to prop up the slender plot with spectacle, what really kills TDKR is Nolan's poor decision to make Batman a supporting character in a Batman movie.

Michael Caine's Alfred is a different man this time and he gets some tear-jerking monologues, but at a crucial moment, Bruce basically calls him a liar because the plot's need for him to be a self-pitying emo dumbass trumps their entire lifetime together. The only reason for Bruce to be that unreasonable is in order to isolate him, but it's clunky and unbelievable and ill serves the whole series, especially in the literal last moments of the film.

I had rewatched Batman Begins (score: 7/10) and The Dark Knight (9/10) in the days leading up to my seeing this and was planning on seeing it in IMAX, so while I wasn't as stoked for this as much as I was for The Avengers, I wanted to see how it'd all wrap up. I just couldn't imagine it ending so shabbily. In my tweets and forum posts about this review in progress I've received a good amount of, "Everyone else likes it so you're wrong, mang!" pushback and that's too bad because I didn't go in with super-high expectations, but didn't even conceive that Nolan would so botch the end of his trilogy. It's even more frustrating because amidst the bluster and clutter are glimpses of potent themes that are tossed off instead of polished to a high shine. (The way Batman reveals his identity to Gordon is very poetic.)

Rewatching the first two films so close to the third only makes it suffer more because you can see how bloated, yet empty,  The Dark Knight Rises is. Batman Begins was an origin story that put us in Bruce Wayne's tortured head  and revealed how he wanted to use the League of Shadows training to do good, refusing to go along with his former mentor Ra's Al Ghul in the end. The Dark Knight ratcheted up the stakes by showing that Batman's crazy ying had an even crazier yang in the form of the Joker. It got a little prone to speechifying, but the characters were chewing on meaty philosophical concepts about heroism, honor, duty to society.

All of that is gone in The Dark Knight Reloaded (as I'm referring to it) because instead of truly breaking down Batman in order for him to...wait for it...rise again - they also reuse BB's "Why do we fall?" "In order to get back up." line enough times for the densest viewer to get. the. point. - they take a man who had already quit and atrophied, kicked him while he was down until he was really down, and then set him aside while a whole bunch of other people do the hard work of liberating Gotham, only for him to pop back in for the last reel, a so-so fist fight, a twist that wasn't to anyone who paid attention to the casting announcements and nerd chatter, and then a intended poignant ending that Nolan didn't have the courage to ride all the way home. The very final details involving a character's name is also the worst writing in the entire series; a beat so corny and cheesy it was like a rail car of popcorn soaked in nacho sauce. Really, Nolan? Really?

Just as I docked Prometheus a couple of points from my initial walking out of the theater feeling, I've socked The Dark Knight Reloaded the same way because it's not enough to be meh about it because this isn't just another comic book movie that can be lightly and charitably handled. No, this is the conclusion of a landmark trilogy by a very talented (if very slightly overrated) filmmaker who hasn't made a movie that I haven't liked a whole lot, so just as Olympic judges mark down hard when gymnasts fail to stick the landing, Christopher Nolan has to take his licks for failing here. I feel that it's not even a matter of him believing his own hype and allowing hubris to make him cavalier about his work, arrogantly thinking that the fans will blindly accept whatever he ladles into their troughs. No, I think he and his collaborators simply decided to make a collectively bad series of decisions because they simply didn't step back to see if it was working when your nose isn't pressed against the tree bark.

In the end, The Dark Knight Rises isn't a terrible loaf of cinematic manure that hacks like Paul W.S. Anderson or Uwe Boll would pinch off; it's worse, because it could and should have been so much better and there is no acceptable excuse for Christopher Nolan to have not wrapped things up competently. It's a darn shame. Better luck next time, Chris. I'll be there because I think you know the answer to the question, "Why do we fall?"

Score: 4/10. Catch it at the dollar show.



As jumbled an rambling as the above is, there are even more things that I left out because they were very spoilerish (so read on at your own risk or if you've seen it already), like:

* What's the deal with Catwoman's sidekick, a girl not named (let's call her Kittengirl!), given little to do, but in one shot it's implied that they're lovers of some sort?

* Bane releases 1000 prisoners from jail and gives them guns. OK, how come in a space as large as Manhattan, none of the MILLIONS of citizens try to overwhelm this relative handful of thugs. The NYPD has 36,000 uniformed cops; allowing for sleep, there couldn't be more than several hundred of Bane's minions running around; easy pickings. Yeah, Bane says that any sign of resistance will lead to the nuke being set off, but shouldn't you call that bluff rather than sit around waiting to die?

* One of the beefs against the Spider-Man films is that they kept taking his mask off too much. Here, Gordon-Levitt's Blake is able to deduce that Bruce is Batman by his expression when visiting the orphanage. A weird beat in the story and it makes me wonder why no one else amongst the burgeoning orphan community figured it out if it's that easy.

* Back to Bane, the reveal of who's truly running the show means he's little more than Odd Job, not Goldfinger himself. So why the followers? Why would anyone listen to this weirdo?

* We're supposed to believe that Alfred is the sole caretaker of stately Wayne Manor because after he's fired, there's no one around to let Bruce in and he's never carried keys, forcing him to have to break into his own place. Who's mowing the grounds? What of his pad in the city?

* A key part of Bane's plot is to get access to Wayne Enterprises' secret Applied Sciences Lab area to get all the nifty toys Lucius Fox has made. How does he 1) know about it and b) know where it is? No one from the League of Shadows knew of it in Batdude Starts, so huh? Never mind who's actually been building the Tumblers and whatnot (I've always figured moonlighting Keebler elves), it's always been the toppest secret, but Bane knows exactly where the toys are stored.

* The cops are supposedly all trapped in tunnels. Why not just kill them? Forget how they come out of the darkness after over three months underground and they look clean and well-fed, with all the manholes and hundreds of miles of tunnels we're told lie beneath the city, there wasn't a single exit to be found to get out? This isn't a Chilean coal mine for crying out loud.

* The caper that bankrupts Bruce Wayne is clearly an act of fraud, but no one seems able to reverse the false trades? If you lose your credit card, you aren't liable for more than $50, but you can have billions stolen in an obvious scam and everyone can only shrug?

* Really, how do we go from day to night in five seconds. If someone made a short film on YouTube with that kind of lapse, they'd be slagged for sloppiness. This reportedly cost $250 million to make and no one looked at the script and said, "The slug line says 'INT - STOCK EXCHANGE -- DAY' then 'EXT - WALL STREET -- DAY' then 'EXT - DOWNTOWN LA -- NIGHT.' What's going on there?" Appears not.

* What purpose does the police brass guy played by Matthew Modine serve other than to show a really dumb cop in authority with misplaced priorities followed by cowardice ending in a meaningless "noble" denouement? Like Catwoman's kitten, he could be removed entirely at no loss.

* Excusing how Bruce gets back to Gotham City, how is he able - in a town where any attempts to get in or out of the island is grounds for setting off the bomb - to paint a flammable substance all over the Brooklyn Bridge to make a bat logo without anyone noticing? EXTRA THOUGHT: Not only is this silly, it's unoriginal as The Crow and Daredevil both used the flaming logo gags.

* Who installed the new Batsignal on the roof? Who got the order and filled it without wondering why this would be needed and then had access to the roof of the police HQ?

That's enough for now. If I think of more, I'll tack it on, but I think I've made my point.

UPDATE: * Catwoman makes this big speech about the rich versus the poor and then hooks up with a rich guy to live the good life. I ain't saying she a gold digger, but...

UPDATE #2: * Back to Modine's lousy cop - they're chasing a gang of thugs who just shot up the Stock Exchange and held everyone hostage, but the moment Batman shows up in the chase, he drops everything to go after him? Blake tries to keep him on target, but he's overruled and the bigger bad guys get a free pass. I sorta get the hard-on Modine has for the "killer of Harvey Dent," but way to be distracted by the shiny object.

UPDATE #3: * Why did Gordon have his speech confessing the truth about Harvey Dent in his pocket other than to have it available to fall into Bane's hands? First we're supposed to believe that Gordon was going to use the big anniversary shindig to blow up the image of Gotham's White Knight, but also that after 8 years of keeping this secret was unable to extemporaneously say something like, "You know, the truth about Harvey was that he was very bad person after the Joker burned half his face off. Batman's innocent, yo! [drops mike]"

* Why was Scarecrow presiding over the kangaroo court other than to turn the hat trick of Cillian Murphy's presence in all three films? He didn't need to be in The Dark Knight and even less here. Shouldn't Bane have been running things?

* Catwoman's story is weak underneath because she's trying to get clear of her past with a Magic Computer Program to expunge her past sins. A better plot would've been her trying to make a deal to be an informer on the Mob in exchange for a pardon and clean slate. It would've made her a little more ambiguous, but make her redemption a little more plausible because it would've been a larger, riskier gesture than just riding the Batpod and snagging a rich dude in the end. But why should I expect nuance in this mess of a script? All the problems started on the page.

* This. Is. KILLER!



* This. Is. Even. More. KILLER! (Even though it basically takes the gazillion words I've written above and made it into a video for the tl;dr set.)

"The Amazing Spider-Man" Review

Throughout my viewing of The Amazing Spider-Man I had this thought in mind: "Didn't we just have this movie about a decade ago?" Sure, we have a new Peter Parker in the form of Andrew Garfield; mopey Mary Jane is out and Emma Stone is in as Gwen Stacy; there is some backstory involving Peter's parents; and they've tweaked some of the specific details as to how Peter becomes spider-powered, how he discovers his powers and how it effects people, but underneath it all, it's pretty much the same movie we saw with Tobey Maguire as Spidey in 2002, right down to the same accidental villain conceit in which a generally decent guy is turned evil by scientific misadventure.

Garfield is a marked improvement over Maguire, able to express the myriad of teen angst and issues he's going through without seeming like a little emo bitch about it. Stone is adorable and spunky, though not as much fun to see soaking wet in the rain, if you know what I mean. (Click here in case you don't. Hiyo!) The supporting performances from Martin Sheen and Sally Field as Uncle Ben (of rice fame, psyche!) and Aunt May are scene-stealers as well as Denis Leary's Capt. Stacy. I didn't care for Rhys Ifans as Dr. Curt Connors/Lizard, but that's because he's not really fleshed out, if you pardon the pun. 

I'd skip seeing it in 3D because the action is mostly at night, very fast moving, and too close to get a good sense of the geography. Director Marc Webb, who directed my fave film of that year with (500) Days of Summer, does OK with the action, but is better with the quiet character scenes. Those are also helped because they're the only fresh notes in the familiar tune of the overall story, many of the story beats are totally lifted from the prior films. Can't we just assume that audiences know the back story of the character and move on with new tales?

Score: 5/10. See it at the dollar show.



While I was blah on it, my girlfriend really liked it, especially odd because Spider-Man 2 had sort of put her off of comic book movies. She was so-so on The Avengers (yeah, sad isn't it?) and I had to drag her to see X-Men: First Class, which she grudgingly admitted liking. She enjoyed the story and the new details, probably because it wasn't so familiar to her. So, ladies, have at it.

At last year's San Diego Comic-Con, this neat moment happened. It's a total setup, but it was a great PR stunt and shows how Garfield was legitimately enthused about playing the part.

"The Crow" Blu-ray

The Crow has always carried with it a macabre mystique due to the tragic accidental shooting death of star Brandon (son of Bruce) Lee during production. (It's really easy to spot when they use a body double: If you aren't seeing his face, it's the double.) But there is more to its lasting appeal than Lee's death that's made it a lasting cultural touchstone which lead to even South Park making this crack a dozen years after its 1994 release:

Hell on Earth 2006
Get More: SOUTH
PARKmore...

Killer, huh? (In case you haven't seen the full episode, Satan shows up dressed as The Crow.)

Anyways, it's been ages since I've watched the whole movie straight through and I'd forgotten how briskly paced, almost impressionistic the first half was in spelling out the scenario of Eric Draven and this fiance, Shelly, being murdered on Devil's Night, the day before their Halloween wedding and how Eric crawls from the grave a year later and with the invulnerability that a crow grants him hunts down and kills his and Shelly's killers. There is very little extraneous stuff in the first half, though it slows a bit as the original gang of knuckleheads is dispatched and the focus switches to their master, Michael Wincott, and his half-sister (Bai Ling in her American film debut) and their interest in this interloper with mystical powers.

Director Alex Proyas followed The Crow up with the similarly dark and moody Dark City in 1998, but the new millennium saw him making lackluster films such as Big Willie vs. the Evil Robots, er, I meant I, Robot and the Nic Cage Doomsday bum-out Knowing. The rain-soaked, monochromatic nighttime setting is pretty well rendered in this Blu-ray transfer. There was a little noise in the reds of the first optical shot showing the crime scene in the miniature's window, but it was isolated to there and it generally looks good and clear with all the black and black imagery. The audio was less impressive, but more a limitation of the source track than a problem with the disc.

On the extras front, I didn't listen to the Proyas commentary yet or watch the 33-minute interview with a seriously twitchy creator James O'Barr, but the archival interview behind-the scenes was interesting and sad as you realize how articulate and intellectual Lee was. The Extended Scenes are better described as Rough Cut First Edit Scenes as they feature much more violence, especially the addition of a poor woman at the arcade T-Bird and boys are introduced blowing up who is terrorized and left trapped in the exploding building.

The Crow isn't a flawless or unqualified "great" movie, but as a mood piece and Goth-comic touchstone it's got its merits. This new Blu-ray is available for around $10-$12 if you know where to shop, so there's no reason for fans to skip adding it to their collections.

Score: 8/10. Buy it.